Don't Lose Sight of the Forest For the Trees

My philosophy when it comes to prepping is really to "Keep Calm and Prep On." In fact, I even went online and created this cute little poster to always remind myself of this:

But lately I'm finding it to be more and more difficult to adhere to this philosophy. Now, I don't prep for a singular event, I prep because it makes sense and because it's the responsible thing to do, and because (as a working mom of two) it saves my behind on a monthly basis when my lovely children have gone through the gallon of milk faster than I thought they would and I have to go to my powdered milk to keep them from having a melt down at lunch :). So when I prep with that mentality, it keeps me from slipping into "the sky is falling" mentality that so many "preppers" seem to have (and almost desire.)

However, the news these days is making it very difficult for me to stay calm and focused. There are so many variables with the very active hurricane season, gas prices on the rise, the drought and its effect on food prices, the increase of civil unrest with the shootings in Colorado and now New York City, and  the myriad other problems in our world today. So, what can I do to keep from feeling antsy and panicky? I'm going to plan, and I'm going to "Keep Calm and Prep On". I'm not going to go crazy, but I am going to make sure that I'm doing at least one thing a day to keep prepped, even if that one thing is just making sure that I'm staying on top of laundry and dishes so that if a hurricane does head this way I don't have to worry about a sink full of dishes or a lack of clothing because the power went out and I can't wash them.

So I'm going to make that commitment today- One prep a day may help keep the panic away. Today's prep? Well, I was going over everything in my head, and one thing that I feel a lot of people overlook is household items and clothing when it comes to preps. We're all focused on the typical "beans, bullets, and band-aids" that we lose sight of the other things we require to live comfortably. And now is the time to look at those things because the summer season is ending, which means that stores are starting to clearance the items for that season as they make room for the fall collections.

I'm going to do some looking around today and look for summer clothes and linens that are on sale. Don't forget, especially if you have kids, that you are going to need to keep bigger clothes in your preps. So look for those things that will never go out of style (sweatpants and sweatshirts, socks, tee-shirts and shorts) that you can find for great prices at the end of the season to buy a size or two bigger for next year. Store them away, and know that you'll have something for the future and that it cost you MUCH less than you will pay when they come back into season in the stores next year.

I'm trying not to lose sight of the bigger picture by getting caught up in the details of prepping. I'm committed to keeping the bigger picture in mind, keeping my family safe and happy, and living responsibly, not living in fear and panic.

So? Tell me what you think. How do you stay calm? Do you try to do one thing a day to prep? Or do you prep in bigger spurts? I'd love to know.

Happy Prepping-

The Prepared Mom

Dehydrating Frozen Veggies

So if you're going to start anywhere for prepping, besides picking up one or two extras of the staples that your family needs and uses all of the time, I would say that the next easiest thing to do is dehydrate food. Now, the easiest thing to dehydrate is by far frozen vegetables. Here is the process:

1. Find some frozen vegetables (preferably when they are on sale, which for me is less than $1 a bag.)
2. Get the dehydrator out and ready- it should be turned on to 135.
3. Open up a bag of frozen vegetables, dump them out on the dehydrator tray, and spread them out.
4. Place the trays in the dehydrator, close it up, and wait for them to be done (for me it usually takes over night.) According to dehydrate2store.com- which is one of my favorite sites and youtube channels, you know your vegetables are dry enough when you have taken 95% of the water out, and they will sound like plastic when you drop them on the counter or on the top of the dehydrator.

There you go! Easy peasy (no pun intended).

Happy Prepping!

-The Prepared Mom

My Prepper's Pickled Peppers

At the height of canning season, our small backyard garden is producing quite a good amount of Italian peppers (not very hot), and apparently, our neighbor's garden is doing the same because he dropped off a good-sized bag of them to us yesterday.

I now find myself in a prepper-pepper dilemma. I've already chopped up and frozen a few ziplock bags of Banana Peppers to put in the freezer, and I've already added them to any dish that I possibly can for daily lunches and dinners, and now I've got to find something else to do with them. So? It's time to make some Prepper's Pickled Peppers!

First plan of action? Hit up the Ball canning book and YouTube (of coarse!). While I've canned a fair amount of food, I still feel like a newbie, and so I always look for tried and true recipes that I know will be safe.....and yummy. Remember, you don't have to reinvent the wheel! There are many resources out there for you to use, and most of them are free! I read through a few different recipes, but I decided to go ahead and use a simple brine recipe that I got from imstillworkin on YouTube (she's one of my favorites, go check her out!). Here's the recipe:

4 cups of water

4 cups of vinegar

4 tsp. of pickling salt

I then got to work with the veggies. I'd already had my peppers in the sink soaking in cold water and a splash of vinegar to get the dirt off. (Isn't that just the best sight ever? Knowing that all of that was from my own garden- well with the help of some of my neighbor's peppers) just warms my prepper heart. 

After the peppers were nice and clean, I took them out of the water, cut a slit down the center, scraped out the ribs (the white stringy stuff) and the seeds, and then cut them into nice little rounds.

I put them into quart-size Mason jars, just so I would have a better idea of how much I was working with. (I'm working on getting a kitchen scale to make these kinds of posts more accurate.) I ended up with 2 1/2 quarts of chopped peppers all ready to pickle!

Now it was time to get to business! The first rule of canning, at least in my humble opinion, is to start with a clean, organized work space. For me, that means clearing off my counters of anything unnecessary, making sure my sink is clean, and having all of my canning equipment clean and waiting for me.

My water bath canner, with jars inside, simmering on the stove and the vinegar solution coming up to a boil.

Lids and rings all washed and placed into a pot to hang out in some simmering water.

Funnel, jar lifter, lid lifter, and air-remover tool all ready to go along with a ladle and a bowl to help keep things neat.

Trust me when I say that spending a little extra time to organize everything and walk through the process saves you a ton of frustration during the process. Now.....let the prepper pickled pepper party begin!

1. Take a jar from the water bath canner, empty it of the simmering/boiling water, and fill your jar with peppers- leaving 1/2 inch headspace (the space between the top of the jar and the food).  Make sure to poke your peppers- lol that sounds funny- to really pack them in. 

2. Next, ladle in the vinegar solution-again making sure to leave 1/2 inch headspace.

3. This step is very important! Make sure to use your air-removal took (or a wooden skewer or chopstick) to poke around in the jar and release the air bubbles. Making sure to add a little more liquid if needed to reach the 1/2 inch headspace requirement.

4. This step is also very important! Make sure to wipe the rim of your jar with a clean, damp paper towel. This will ensure that nothing gets between your jar lid and the rim of the mason jar, which would ruin the seal.

5. Place a jar lid and a band on the mason jar and tighten to "finger tight" which just means not too tight- just enough that you can comfortably open in with your fingers.

6. Using your jar lifter, put the mason jar into the rack of your canner where it will keep nice and warm and snuggly while you fill the rest of the jars :)

Once you have finished, lower the canning rack into the canner and put the cover on. I set my stove to med-high heat and waited for the water to come to a rolling boil. Once it reached the rolling boil stage, I set my timer for 15 minutes and started to clean up the kitchen!

After 15 minutes, I took the jars out of the canner and put them on a dishtowel on my counter, leaving a fair amount of space between the jars, where they can sit and cool and seal. I counted and heard all 5 of the jars ping- telling me that they had sealed. Another successful foray into the canning world!

Final Thoughts:

Easy? Check!

Frugal? Check!- Free veggies from the garden and a few dollars in vinegar, salt, and a mason jar.

Worth While? Definitely! I can't wait to give these a try on hamburgers, hotdogs, and sandwiches!

I hope you're all giving canning a try! Let me know if you have any questions, comments, criticism (constructive), concerns, etc. I'd love to hear from you!

Happy Prepping-

 The Prepared Mom

Why It's Important To Do Your Homework

Wow! My first real post here at my new blog host! I have so many things that I want to write about, so I need to make sure to stay on track and not ramble :)

First, let me say that I am in no way affiliated with any of the companies that I am about to discuss. I'm simply a consumer giving my humble opinion after doing a bunch of research and comparison shopping.

Today is the last day of Honeyville's sale where they have offered a 15% off of your entire order coupon code----(It's SPLASH by the way) and I was sitting down to finally look at what they had to offer and to decide if I wanted to spend my monthly prepping budget there. I'm sure most people see "15% off your total order" and immediately start clicking away, filling their virtual shopping baskets with tons of fancy #10 cans with yummy food storage foods. However, it's so important to take a step back and really look at what you're getting, and do some comparison shopping to make sure that the sale is really a good bargain.

Let me start by saying that for many of my long term storage food staples, I use the LDS cannery as a mark for how much I should pay for those items. Although I do have to drive about an hour or so to get to the nearest cannery, the prices are so low that they usually justify the drive. They have great prices on rice, oats, beans, potato flakes, wheat, and powdered milk and they are always very helpful and welcoming. So, when I see that a company has one of those items on sale, I will first go to my LDS price list to see just how good of a deal it is.

However, if I'm not planning an LDS trip any time soon, then I head to the internet to start my comparison shopping. Here's one of the deals I had to work out today:

Kidney Beans- We need more. So, we head over to Honeyville and see that they have a 25 pound bag of Light Red Kidney Beans for $46.99 which would make it $39.94 with the 15% discount. This looks like a pretty good deal to me, however I need to take a step back and look at the fact that I need to factor in shipping, $4.49, and the fact that the beans would need to be repacked into either mylar bags, or mason jars (Which would just be silly considering there are 25lbs of beans!).

What usually helps me make my decision is to bring it down to the smallest measurement possible, which in this case is ounces. So at Honeyville, the beans are about 10 cents per ounce.

Next I headed over to Emergency Essentials, and saw that they had a Super Pail of Kidney Beans for $72.95. Now this doesn't look like a great deal at all! Seventy-two dollars? For Beans? But then I took a deep calming breath, put the cheap-monster back in the closet, and took a closer look.

Forty pounds of beans at $72.95 equals out to .12 cents an ounce. Still more expensive than Honeyville, however, the beans from Emergency Essentials come already packaged in a mylar bag, with an oxygen absorber, all inside of a 6 gallon bucket. This is way more bang for my buck! It beats the pants off of the Honeyville sale! So we ended up deciding to go with EE's beans.

I suppose the purpose of this rather long ramble is just to remind you to look at what you are getting when something is on "sale" and make sure to do your comparison shopping. There are usually better deals to be had when something is on "sale."

Also, remember that these companies will usually have a few great deals to bring you in, but that there other items are usually more expensive. So even though we went with Emergency Essentials for our beans, I had to take a step back and refrain from adding the food mill that I wanted into the order because when I looked over on Amazon.com I realized that EE's price was way more than Amazon would be. The moral of this story? Even though it may be more of a pain to go to different stores to get my prep needs, it's often more cost effective.

Finally, to be a frugal prepper keep the following things in mind:

1. Always comparison shop, and remember that sometimes it's easier to compare things by breaking them down to their smallest measurement.

2. Keep a list of the prices that you have found on things you know you need, that way you'll know when something is a good deal or not.

3. Be patient and wait for the right deal to come along. You don't want to jump the gun only to regret it when you find it somewhere else for a much cheaper price.

Happy Prepping!

-The Prepared Mom

What Hurricane Irene Taught Me About My Preps So Far

This blog entry was originally posted on August 28, 2011

Although we got very lucky and were not hit by the Category 1 Hurricane that Irene was supposed to be when she came through our state, there was still some significant wind and rain from the Tropical Storm. As we were preparing for this storm to come through, I realized a few things about our preps that made me feel really good and a few good lessons that I will heed from now on.

#1- My working out and fitness program paid off. 

As my husband and I were carrying the large picnic table over the baby gate and down the porch stairs, and then returning up to pick up the grill to bring downstairs as well, I realized that there was absolutely no way I would have been able to do that 3 months ago. My desire to be healthy and fit started before we started “prepping”, but as we started prepping I realized that it was a very important part of preparedness. My thoughts on this were only reinforced as I was left along to  to pick furniture up to put it on wood blocks and rubbermaid totes to keep it from getting wet, and load up my car to go spend the night with my parents. (My husband had been mandated for a shift at work because of the storm.)

#2 Being prepared, even if it wasn’t for the exact situation that played out, eases one’s mind and lowers the stress level associated with dangerous situations.

My husband and I have been preparing to “bug in” and hunker down and stay safe during most situations. In fact, we decided that things would have to be pretty terrible before we left our house. So, we’ve got all of our stock and preps in the house, and only small bags that are really more of what most would call “get home bags” than “bug out bags.” So, when the threat of Hurricane Irene came about, I was very secure knowing that I didn’t have to run around securing food, water, batteries, etc. Then? Hubby gets mandated for a shift at work (something we stupidly did not think about) and I am faced with the decision of whether to stay home with my two babies in a house that floods when there is heavy rain and is surrounded by tall trees, or to leave and go to my parents house (knowing that they are really not “preppers”). Even though I ended up completely changing my plans and leaving, being prepared made it easy to change plans and made my life much less stressful as I got things together to leave. It really does prove that prepping is a state of mind, and not just the acquiring of goods.

#3- Keeping a Clean/Organized House is Part of Prepping

Keeping up with the dishes and the laundry, and making sure that everything is in its place may be difficult for us working, prepper moms, but it sure does make a difference when faced with a dangerous situation. With the threat from the power company that we might be without power for up to or beyond a week, I did not have to run around like a crazy person washing clothes and dishes to make sure that I was ready for there to be no power for an extended period of time. I knew that I had very minimal work to do to ensure that I would be in good shape if we lost power. Being organized also helped greatly because I knew exactly which clothes I wanted to pack for me and my kids when we made the decision to leave, where the suitcase was, where the kids backpacks were, etc. It definitely made my life easier not having to worry about what was clean and what wasn’t, or knowing exactly where the suitcase was and not having to dig it out of a pile of junk in the basement.

#4- Do Not Put Off Tomorrow What Can Be Done Today

We have just finished rebuilding, reorganizing, and stocking our store room and we had a few other things left to do. One of those things being to put 50lbs of rice, 50lbs of beans, 25lbs of oats, and 50lbs of salt into mylar bags and 5-gallon buckets. We had left the big bags of goods in our store room and said that we would get to it ASAP. However, when the threat of Irene was upon us, I realized that if we got water (which we most certainly would) all of our large bags of goods would be ruined. And so I was left filling bags and buckets in the 9th hour when I really should have been spending my time doing other storm preps. I definitely learned my lesson of doing today what I can, and not leaving projects unfinished.

These are just a few of the things that I was reflecting upon throughout the hurricane/tropical storm. While I am very happy to report that we did not get any water (which was a miracle) thanks to a sump pump, nor did we lose power- I also know that I would have been completely ready to deal with any of the problems that would have occured had that not been the case.

I hope that everyone else stayed safe throughout the storm- and I hope that people use this as a wake-up call or time of reflection on prepping.

Happy Prepping!

Beginning at the Beginning

Originally posted on July 23, 2011- After reading over this post again, I've decided that this really like my Genesis- where all things begin.

After having sat back for a bit and taken a deep breath, I’ve decided to attack my prepping in a very systematic way. I was finding myself getting quite overwhelmed with everything I wanted to learn and acquire, especially since I’ve been feeling such a sense of urgency to get as prepared as I can. So, I decided to start at the beginning and work my way forward from there. So, where is the obvious place to begin? I suppose where life itself began: water.

If anyone has done any reading about surviving or preparedness, then he or she knows that the most important necessity is water. People can live 3 weeks without food, but only 3 days without water. So, it is imperative that I have at least 3 days worth of water on hand at all times, although my plan is to try for at least a month’s worth of water. I’ve been picking up bottled water whenever it is on sale- which for me is less than $2.99 for a 24 pack. But, I know that I don’t have nearly enough water, especially because we grab bottles on a daily basis whenever we are running out of the house and need some.

So I did some researching online and, while I would definitely like to invest in a 55 gallon drum for water storage, that is just not feasible right now on our budget (because I’m still out on maternity leave and not getting a paycheck), and it is not feasible for the amount of storage space we have at the moment. So I decided to go with 4- 7 gallon water storage jugs from REI, where I also got free shipping. REI had them the cheapest (at $16 for 1 storage container).

These 4 containers will fit in the space that I currently have, and it will provide enough water for my family for 3 days. So I hit my first goal! Or at least I will when the containers arrive in a few days. Enough water for 3 days for my family of 4 plus 4 of my extended family members.

I will continue to buy bottled water when it is on sale, but at least I know that what is in those bottles is there all of the time.

I’m feeling refreshed already! It’s nice to see some real progress towards my goals, and it is nice to feel that I am organized and have a plan of attack for this giant task of prepping.

Feeling Overwhelmed

Originally Posted on July 19, 2011

It’s been a while since my last post, mostly because I’ve been busy this past week, but also because I don’t know what to write about. It’s not that I don’t have a million ideas bouncing around in my head, it’s that I don’t know where to begin. I am feeling entirely overwhelmed lately. It seems as though each new door I open into the prepping world, the bigger the pile of junk that falls out. I know that I need to just take things one at a time, but there is so much that I want to do, and I’m just feeling a great sense of urgency to get them done- especially considering all that is in the news lately. So, if anyone is out there reading this, I apologize for the scattered nature of my posts, but that is how I am feeling lately. Scattered.

Although I’m feeling so overwhelmed and scattered, I am getting things accomplished. I’ve gotten some mushrooms, carrots, strawberries, and bananas dehydrated and put away. I’ve also gotten my canned goods organized. I ended up buying an amazing can rotating system from Shelf Reliance- and I’ve almost gotten it filled with veggies, beans, chili, etc. Looking at that makes me feel like I am making progress. It was super easy to put together, and it makes my OCD very happy to see all the cans lined up nicely in order of expiration dates.

Well, I feel like I’ve rambled here. And I think I will take some time to make a list of topics I’d like to blog about and return when I feel like I can better express my thoughts.

Until then….Happy Prepping!
-A Prepared Mom